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Inside the city, where ten rather than six ducts are being prepared, they must occasionally sprout up out of the ground and run along the undersides of bridges and flyovers. In these sections it is easy to identify FLAG's duct because, unlike the others, it is galvanized steel instead of PVC. FLAG undoubtedly specified steel for its far greater protective value, but in so doing posed a challenge for Engineer Musalam, who knew that thieves would attack the system wherever they could reach it - not to take the cable but to get their hands on that tempting steel pipe. So, wherever the undersides of these bridges and flyovers are within 2 or 3 meters of ground level, Engineer Musalam has built in special measures to make it virtually impossible for thieves to get their hands on FLAG's pipe.
For the most part, the duct installation is a simple cut-and-cover operation, right down the median strip. But the median is crossed frequently by nicely paved, heavily trafficked U-turn routes. To cut or block one of these would be unthinkable, since no journey in Egypt is complete without numerous U-turns. It is therefore necessary to bore a horizontal tu
We blundered across Engineer Musalam's path one afternoon. This was sheer luck, but also kind of inevitable: other than ditch diggers, the only people in the median strip of this highway are hacker tourists and ARENTO engineers. He was here because one of the crews working on FLAG had, while enlarging a manhole excavation, plunged the blade of their backhoe right through the main communications cable co
The ditch diggers made the hole even larger, whittling out a place for one of the splicing technicians to sit. The technicians stood on the brink of the pit offering directions, and eventually they jumped into it and grabbed shovels; their toolboxes were lowered in after them on ropes, and their black dress trousers and crisp white shirts rapidly converged on the same color as the dust covered them. In the lee of an unburied concrete manhole nearby, a couple of men established a little refreshment center: one hubbly-bubbly and one portable stove, shooting flames like a miniature oil well fire, where they cranked out glass after glass of heavily sweetened tea. This struck me as more efficient than the American technique of sending a gofer down to the 7-Eleven for a brace of Super Big Gulps. Traffic swirled around the adjacent U-turn; motorists rolled their windows down and asked for directions, which were cheerfully given. Egyptian males are not afraid to hold hands with each other or to ask for directions, which does not mean that they should be confused with sensitive New Age males.
The mangled ends of the cable were cleanly hacksawed and stripped, and a 2-meter-long segment of the same type of cable was wrestled out of a car and brought into the pit. Two lengths of lead pipe were threaded onto it, later to serve as protective bandages for the splices, and then the splicing began, one conductor at a time. Engineer Musalam watched attentively while I badgered him with nerdy questions.He brought me up to speed on the latest submarine cable gossip. During the previous month, in mid-June, SEA-ME-WE 2 had been cut twice between Djibouti and India. Two cable ships, Restorer and Enterprise, had been sent to fix the breaks. But fire had broken out in the engine room of the Enterprise (maybe a problem with the dilithium crystals), putting it into repairs for four weeks. So Restorer had to fix both breaks. But because of bad weather, only one of the faults had been repaired as of July 26. In the meantime, all of SEA-ME-WE 2's traffic had been shunted to a satellite link reserved as a backup.
Satellite links have enough bandwidth to fill in for a second-generation optical cable like SEA-ME-WE 2 but not enough to replace a third-generation one like FLAG or SEA-ME-WE 3. The cable industry is therefore venturing into new and somewhat unexplored territory with the current generation of cables. It is out of the question to run such a system without having elaborate backup plans, and if satellites can't hack it anymore, the only possible backup is on another cable - almost by definition, a competing cable. So as intensely as rival companies may compete with each other for customers, they are probably cooperating at the same time by reserving capacity on each other's systems. This presumably accounts for the fact that they are eager to spread nasty information about each other but will never do so on the record.
I didn't know the exact route of SEA-ME-WE 3 and was intrigued to learn that it will be passing through the same building in Alexandria as SEA-ME-WE 1 and 2, which is also the same building that will be used by FLAG. In addition, there is a new submarine cable called Africa 1 that is going to completely encircle that continent, it being much easier to circumnavigate Africa with a cable-laying ship than to run ducts and cables across it (though I would like to see Alan Wall have a go at it). Africa 1 will also pass through Engineer Musalam's building in Alexandria, which will therefore serve as the cross-co
Though Engineer Musalam is not the type who would come out and say it, the fact is that in a couple of years he's going to be ru
As the sun dropped behind the western Sahara (I imagined Mu'ammar Gadhafi out there somewhere, picking up his telephone to hear a fast busy signal), Engineer Musalam drove me into Alexandria in his humble subcompact to see this planetary nexus.
It is an immense neoclassical pile constructed in 1933 by the British to house their PTT operations. Since then, it has changed very little except for the addition of a window air conditioner in Engineer Musalam's office. The building faces Alexandria's railway station across an asphalt square crowded with cars, trucks, donkey carts, and pedestrians.
I do not think any other hacker tourist will ever make it inside this building. If you do so much as raise a camera to your face in its vicinity, an angry man in a uniform will charge up to you and let you get a very good look at the bayonet fixed to the end of his automatic weapon. So let me try to convey what it is like:
The adjective Blade-Ru